Leon Trotsky: The Guǎngzhōu Uprising

From: On the New Stage

December 15, 1927

[Leon Trotsky on China, New York 1976, p. 274. I tried to use the Pīnyīn spelling of Chinese names. I use the spelling from the original text in a hyperlink, if it differs significantly]

4. Control in the party, and therefore in the country too, is in the hands of the Stalin faction, which has all the features of centrism, a centrism which is, moreover, in the period of decline and not of upsurge. That means short zigzags to the left, longer zigzags to the right. One can have no doubt that the last move to the left (the jubilee manifesto) produces the necessity of placating the right wing and its real supports in the country — not with words, but with deeds.

5. The zigzags to the left are not only expressed in hastily prepared jubilee manifestos The Guǎngzhōu rising is unquestionably an adventurist zigzag by the Comintern to the left, after the disastrous consequences of the Menshevik policy in China have made themselves fully apparent. The Guǎngzhōu episode is a worse and more pernicious repetition of the Estonian putsch of 1924, after the revolutionary situation in Germany of 1923 had been missed. Menshevism plus bureaucratic adventurism have dealt a double blow to the Chinese revolution; we need not doubt that the revenge for Guǎngzhōu will be a new and longer zigzag to the right in the field of international politics, especially Chinese.